The Jilin-to-Beijing power transmission corridor is more than a single infrastructure project. It is a strategic bridge connecting the energy strengths of Northeast China with the electricity demand of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.
On September 4, in Da'an City, Baicheng, Jilin Province, the Jingneng Da'an 2x660MW thermal power peak-shaving project was officially launched. As a key supporting project of the Northeast Songliao Clean Energy Base power transmission to North China project, a major initiative in the national 14th Five-Year Plan for electric power, its start of construction marks the transition of the Jilin-to-Beijing corridor from planning to full-scale building.
With total investment of 6.036 billion yuan, the peak-shaving units represent a 1,000-kilometer energy artery crossing six provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions. It links the wind and solar resources of the Songliao Plain to the power needs of the capital, carrying the dual missions of Northeast revitalization and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei coordinated development.
The consumption dilemma on the Songliao Plain
Northeast China has never lacked wind and solar resources. The Baicheng and Songyuan areas in western Jilin sit in the southwest airflow channel between the Greater Khingan Mountains and the Changbai Mountains. Average wind speeds reach 6 to 7 meters per second, and annual utilization hours of wind turbines exceed 3,000, making the area one of the country's nine major clean energy bases and the core zone of the Songliao Clean Energy Base.
The eastern mountainous area and central plains are also rich in solar resources, with average annual sunshine hours of 2,000 to 3,000. With such advantages, Jilin proposed building an onshore wind and solar Three Gorges as early as 2021.
The main project covers 3 cities and 11 counties including Baicheng, Songyuan, and Siping, with a goal of reaching 30 million kilowatts of new energy installed capacity by 2025. By the end of 2025, Jilin's installed capacity of new and renewable energy had reached 33.8967 million kilowatts, accounting for 65.82% of total installed capacity, while power generation accounted for 50.19% of total output. Installed capacity exceeded the target, but annual power generation fell short of expectations.
The trend continued into 2026. By the end of February, Jilin's total installed power generation capacity was about 51.99 million kilowatts, up about 10% year on year. Wind power was the largest power source in the province, accounting for about 37%, while wind and solar combined accounted for about 51%.
The key problem is not generating power but transmitting it. Monitoring and evaluation results on national renewable energy power development in 2024 showed that Jilin's wind power utilization rate was relatively low at only 93.6%. By 2025, consumption pressure intensified further. The new energy utilization rate was about 93%, down about 2 percentage points year on year. Curtailed electricity was about 3.6 billion kilowatt-hours, up about 56% year on year, with wind power curtailment accounting for about 91% of the total.
This is not a new issue. As early as February 2017, Jilin was designated by the National Energy Administration as a red alert area for wind power development and construction. The alert was not lifted until 2019, but consumption pressure was never truly resolved.
Industry experts compare wind and solar power to local agricultural products. As planting scale expands, local residents cannot consume everything, deep processing capacity cannot keep up, and external logistics channels are not smooth, so part of the output is simply wasted. That analogy captures the root of wind and solar curtailment.
A five-year journey
The Jilin-to-Beijing project is the remedy for this problem. The project involves 59 billion yuan of investment within Jilin Province, including nearly 40 billion yuan in Da'an, and covers five core sectors: thermal power, wind power, solar power, power grids, and energy storage. Relying on an plus or minus 800 kV ultra-high-voltage direct current channel, it starts from Baicheng, Jilin, passes through Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Hebei, and Tianjin, and reaches Tongzhou, Beijing.
As Jilin's first ultra-high-voltage channel, the path has taken about five years. In 2021, Jilin proposed in its 14th Five-Year Plan to launch the Jilin power transmission to the south ultra-high-voltage power export channel at an appropriate time. In August 2023, the National Energy Administration said in a reply that it initially considered listing the Northeast Songliao Clean Energy Base power transmission to North China project as a key cross-provincial and cross-regional power transmission channel in the advance reserve category. In December of the same year, the mid-term rolling adjustment opinions on the 14th Five-Year Plan for electric power development formally included the project in the plan.
In March 2026, feasibility studies and preliminary work on the project continued, and environmental assessment information for the Da'an thermal power peak-shaving project was first publicly disclosed the same month. On September 4 this year, the Jilin-to-Beijing Da'an 2x660MW thermal power peak-shaving project was officially launched in Da'an City, Baicheng, Jilin, marking the project's entry into full-scale construction.
Behind this is Jilin's urgent expectation for a major energy export channel. Jin Xikui, director of the Da'an Energy Bureau, said departments in Da'an worked together to tackle difficulties and compressed the time from quota issuance to completion of procedures for the thermal power project from the usual 26 months to just 5 months. Chen Yue, director of the Da'an Natural Resources Bureau, said a special working group was formed to provide frontline services and efficiently complete land pre-examination, planning site selection, and construction land approval, fully guaranteeing project land needs.
After the project is fully operational, it can transmit 26.4 billion kilowatt-hours of clean green electricity to North China each year and directly create 5,000 jobs. For Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Beijing's total green electricity supply will rise to 68 billion kilowatt-hours, 15 percentage points higher than the current level, reducing standard coal consumption by more than 8 million tons and carbon dioxide emissions by more than 20 million tons annually.
Industry estimates suggest this transmission volume is equivalent to one quarter of Jilin's total power generation in 2025. More importantly, the clean energy advantages of Northeast China will be directly connected to market demand in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, and the consumption dilemma is expected to be resolved.
Rigid demand at both ends
For Jilin and the entire Northeast, the significance of the Jilin-to-Beijing project goes far beyond a transmission channel. In the first half of this year, GDP in Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning was 738.99 billion yuan, 697.88 billion yuan, and 1.62272 trillion yuan, respectively, up 3.5%, 2.4%, and 2.5% year on year. All three growth rates were below the national average. Jilin ranked near the bottom nationally and last in Northeast China.
In particular, in the first half of this year, Jilin's value-added of industrial enterprises above designated size fell 1.2%, turning negative. Automobile manufacturing value-added dropped 21.0%. As the birthplace of New China's automobile industry, Jilin's automobile industry value-added once accounted for more than one quarter of the province's industry, but in 2025 Jilin was pushed out of the country's top ten automobile-producing provinces for the first time, falling to 13th.
With traditional pillar industries under transformation pressure, green energy is expected to play a major role. The main leaders of the Jilin provincial government emphasized at a special meeting on building a hydrogen energy pilot city cluster that green energy must remain the greatest growth pole for Jilin's revitalization and development and an important breakthrough for future industries, with continued efforts to cultivate and expand the hydrogen-based green energy industrial ecosystem and build the country's largest green liquid fuel supply base.
Jilin's 15th Five-Year Plan outline has made clear that in the next five years, average annual new wind and solar installed capacity will be about 10 million kilowatts, and by 2030 the province's total wind and solar installed capacity will reach 70 million kilowatts. The western base will build three major consumption systems: cross-provincial transmission to Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, direct industrial supply within the province, and local conversion of wind and solar power into hydrogen, focusing on solving the wind curtailment problem.
For Beijing at the other end, the Jilin-to-Beijing project is also rigid demand, and demand is growing faster than expected. Data from the Capital Power Exchange Center show that from January to April this year, Beijing's market-based direct trading of green electricity reached 18.8 billion kilowatt-hours, up 82.54% year on year. The trading scale exceeded thermal power for the first time, accounting for 63.63% of total market-based electricity trading. Of that, 99.97% of green electricity came from 14 provinces and regions including Xinjiang, Tibet, Shanxi, and Jilin.
Wang Li, deputy general manager of the Capital Power Exchange Center, said that since the beginning of this year, the center has greatly shortened the green electricity trading cycle based on actual enterprise needs. Multi-year transactions can be conducted monthly, cross-provincial and cross-regional transactions can be conducted as often as every 10 days, and Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan transactions can be handled weekly. Enterprises can buy green electricity in a short time, and trading is becoming more flexible.
The Capital Power Exchange Center said that in 2026, Beijing's green electricity input from other provinces will reach 45 billion kilowatt-hours. But that figure still leaves a gap of 23 billion kilowatt-hours from the 68 billion kilowatt-hour target. The Jilin-to-Beijing project's annual transmission volume of 26.4 billion kilowatt-hours can exactly fill that gap.
The outline of Beijing's 15th Five-Year Plan for national economic and social development takes reducing gas, using less oil, cleaning coal, and increasing green power as core principles, and proposes building a strong, resilient, clean, low-carbon, intelligent, and efficient new energy system. In the future, Beijing will continue to deepen cross-provincial green electricity cooperation and market-based trading mechanisms, turning green electricity from the northwest, north China, and other regions into green momentum for the capital's high-quality development.
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